Judging Freedom - Col. Douglas Macgregor: Is WWIII Here?

Episode Date: April 9, 2024

Col. Douglas Macgregor: Is WWIII Here?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Thank you. Hi, everyone. Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Tuesday, April 9th, 2024. Colonel Douglas McGregor joins us. Colonel, always a pleasure. My dear friend, thank you for your time. Thank you also for a brilliant column that you have recently authored entitled, Will Israel's War Expand and Will Netanyahu Bring the U.S. Along for the Ride? I plan on going through much in the column when we, during our conversation, which we're beginning now. You have written, starting with Ukraine now, that events in Ukraine have mobilized or solidified Asia, Africa, Latin America, and parts of Europe against the United States and the West.

Can you explain what you mean by that, please, Colonel? Well, you have to look at a number of things, but most important, we have appealed to the world to back this proxy war in Ukraine against Russia, and it hasn't worked. When you look at most of the so-called developing world, it's almost universally behind Russia. And naturally, it has helped enormously for China and India, which represent, let's put it bluntly, almost half or more of the population of the planet to sign on for Russia. So then you add to this the BRICS issue,

and even though BRICS only has at this point eight or nine members, the truth is there are 84 nations preparing to join it. Of course, is the financial effort to move to gold pegged currency. In other words, to get out from under our financial hegemony. So you have on the one hand, large numbers of people who are tired of being targets for U.S. military intervention and CIA meddling on the one hand, and on the other, you have people that said, we don't want to be under the financial thumb of the United States and New York City any longer. It's interesting about gold.

Of course, the United States was on the gold standard until FDR partially took us off, and then Nixon completed the removal, and now you have these developing nations with a better understanding. I don't want to get into Economics 101, but I have to comment on this. I have a better understanding of Economics 101 and the value to stability of gold than the United States and the West has. You probably agree with me on that. Oh, yeah, obviously, And I don't know how much gold we actually have. You'll recall that our friend Dr. Ron Paul has tried repeatedly, at least while he was in office, to audit the whole system and inspect the gold holdings.

Right. He was never allowed to do so, which leads me to question just how much is really there. And that's not a good thing either. The Germans wanted to repatriate all of their gold. And I think they got something in the neighborhood of 60% back, but the rest continues to sit somewhere inside the United States, presumably under the streets of New York City. But who knows? And I think this is part of our problem. And you're right. Nixon said at the time, as you know know that this was a temporary measure like so many other things in washington because we faced at that point financial ruin and crisis because lbj had bankrupted us in vietnam and with his war on poverty and if you go back and look at those circumstances and look at where we are today no one can take us off anything to rescue us at this point. Remember Milton Friedman's famous one-liner,

nothing in the world is more permanent than a temporary government program. Exactly. Does Russia have the upper hand in Europe today from and after Ukraine? That is, is its military stronger than the combined militaries of Europe? Yes. Keep in mind that the combined militaries of Europe don't amount to much. We want to add up the amounts of money invested in defense, and we want to look at the numbers of people in 32 countries that might serve in the military, but it's entirely meaningless. Russia has an enormous advantage. It's homogenous. It's raised at a sizable force, now well over 800,000 and climbing. It speaks one language of command. It has one unified military command

structure. It has absolute unity of effort. None of that exists in NATO. Everyone is sort of a band-aid over its gaping wound of incompetence, inefficiency, and ill-equipped character. In other words, everyone plugs in or tries to plug into the United States and its force. Our force is now minuscule. We couldn't send anything to Europe to make any difference right now and anything short of six months to a year if we were lucky. So we're in no position to confront the Russians anywhere in Eastern or, excuse me, in Ukraine, period. And that's going to become very, very obvious in the months ahead when the Russian offensive sweeps out of its way, whatever is in front of it. We're going to watch, frankly, as we in Washington, our government, our people,

and our NATO alliance is humiliated and is revealed as impotent and irrelevant. Here's a statement from Deputy Secretary of State Campbell. I think you'll agree with the first part about the Russian military and disagree with the second part. It's propaganda about Ukraine, but it's interesting what he said. Russia has almost completely reconstituted militarily. And after the initial setbacks on the battlefield delivered to them by a brave and hardy group in Ukraine. With the support of China, in particular, dual use capabilities, a variety of other efforts, industrial and commercial, Russia has retooled and now poses a threat to Ukraine as we are struggling to get

the supplemental. But not just to Ukraine, its newfound capabilities pose a longer term challenge to stability in Europe and threatens NATO allies. I just want to address the first part because you've been saying that for a while. You just said it a few minutes ago. The Russian military is stronger in many different measurements today than it was before the special military operation began, notwithstanding its initial foray of losses. Is there any question in your mind, Colonel McGregor, which side would win a land war today, Russia or NATO? Absolutely none. The Russians would win hands down. There's no question about it. The good news is the Russians aren't interested in it.

They don't want it. They never have. And what we interpreted as losses were not really significant at all at the beginning of the operation. It's simply that President Putin and the assumptions that he ordained for the military were inaccurate. He thought that he was going to go in with a small force, signal the seriousness with which Moscow takes our activities in Ukraine at the time, and that we would then say, oh, we need to stop this. This is a destructive war. Let's negotiate. And of course, he discovered quite the opposite. We were not only going to not negotiate, we were going to do everything in our power to destroy his country. We are now on the road to humiliation.

That's the bottom line. We can't stop anything. And the $60 billion that Kurt Campbell mentioned is like taking a garden hose to a five-alarm fire. Who are we kidding? It's a drop in the bucket. How much of it will ever get to Ukraine? Very little.

How much of it will disappear into the corruption? Most of it. What doesn't go to Ukraine, which is more than half of it, will just circulate in Washington, make donors and constituents happy and enrich the usual suspects in the defense industry and inside the beltway. So it's just absurd. He's an intelligent man. Kurt Campbell knows better. He's repeating a mantra because he has to as part of the regime. He's repeating the mantra that the White House wants as they try to get Speaker Johnson to cave on his heretofore resistance to even allowing the issues like the border in order to craft together an alliance to get enough votes to pass the $61 billion and to keep his job as Speaker. I don't know if you

want to get into the politics, but how I wish they would listen to 15 minutes on the inadvisability of this $61 billion and how it'll make things worse. Sure. Look, I'm not confident that that's not understood by Mike Johnson. Well, we have to understand that his paymasters are the same as the paymasters controlling everything else. You've got to look at who is putting money into his reelection fund, his political action committee that keeps him in office. And I think you would find that these paymasters are behind most of the Democrats and certainly large numbers of the Republicans. This has nothing to do with what makes sense, what is rational, what is right or what is wrong. This has everything to do with paying tribute to the people that keep you in office, that bought your office for you and are going

to keep you there. That's all. Is the war, transitioning Colonel, is the war in Gaza about Israel national security and about eliminating Hamas or is it about expanding the land mass of the Israeli state well first of all if it were about Israeli national security I imagine the Israelis would have gone about it rather differently there are different kinds of things that could be done other than massive bombardment because you have special ops forces you have very competent special ops troops in the israeli defense force they could have gone in there and done a lot of damage without bombing the place into submission and as we all know when you do that to a an urban area you make it easier to defend and that's why hamas continues to operate and is absolutely not

destroyed or conquered now this has no longer has anything to do with Israeli national security because Hamas on its best day could never possibly challenge the Israeli state and put its existence at threat. This is an old plan taken off the shelf, dusted off and put into action. This is something the Israelis have wanted to do for a long time, which is eradicate what's left of the Arab population from Israel. I've had more than one tell me privately, you know, we should have done this 30 or 40 years ago. Well, okay, but, you know, they recognized that that opportunity was passed. It was no longer possible. Well, it's turned out to be possible because 30 or 40 years ago, the Israel lobby and its agents inside the United States did

not control the U.S. government. Today, they control the United States government. They control the media. They control finance, not just us, but also London and much of Western Europe. And as a result, they can impose discipline. And that's what you're seeing in operation. We are not going to walk away from Israel. We're going to back them to the hilt. So yes, we're backing the expansion of the Israeli state. No question about it. Here's somebody that you and I probably don't agree with on much, but he certainly agrees with what you just said, former director of the CIA and former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, who says Netanyahu must know that he can't defeat Hamas. Netanyahu keeps saying we're going to destroy Hamas. Look, you're not going to destroy Hamas.

Hamas is going to be around. What you can destroy is the leadership that was involved by Hamas in the attack on October 7th. And I don't think he's made that clear, that ultimately this is about killing the leadership of Hamas, not just wiping out Hamas. If we had a better sense of mission here, I think we'd have a better sense of how this war could come to an end. Does the second part of his statement resonate with you, or is killing the leadership only going to replace it with younger, even more passionately committed leadership? Yeah, it's a dumb idea. The notion that you're going to decapitate your opponent and then suddenly everything will improve is utter and complete nonsense. What happens when you remove a CEO of a corporation? You get another one. So this whole decapitation strategy, which is

very popular inside the Beltway with politicians because they think it's some sort of neat, clean thing to do. I mean, this is the trap that President Trump fell into with Soleimani. You know, did Soleimani's death improve the strategic position of U.S. interests or Israeli interests in the region? Of course not. This is absurd. These people are replaced, and as you point out, sometimes they're much better. The real point is this.

If you're an Israeli and you look at Gaza, you conclude that there's only one way to eliminate Hamas from threatening Israel. I'm not signing on for this, but I'm trying to explain it. You remove the population. You know, this is the point. If you can't remove the population, Hamas will persist. Well, that means that there can be no change in Israel. There can be no change in policy, attitude, or interaction between the Israeli government and the Israeli people and the people that surround them. That's the point. In other words, it's Israel's way or the highway. The highway means the population in Gaza must be expelled or killed,

whether that comes through kinetic action or starvation or anything else is irrelevant to the Israelis. But the population itself has to go. Is the feeling now nearly around the world that Netanyahu is extending the war beyond what it needs to be in order to stay in office? I think people concluded that at Christmas last year uh I don't think anybody questions that except here in the United States once again

you know we are hostage to Israeli power and influence inside the United States and Mr net and Yahoo's control of events I mean Mr net and Yahoo has made it clear on more than one occasion that he calls the tune in washington he does uh so i here is is what counts what counts right now more than anything else is what americans think americans i'm not sure really engaged and that's part of the problem how do you get them engaged to understand what's going on and being done in their name. I mean, this is depressing, but, you know, you've had many people on here, Aron Mate and Brother Blumenthal, everything else, they make these points over and over and over again. The truth is that most Americans are not engaged. And so they're not paying attention to where their money goes. What do you think the Iranians will do in response to the Israeli destruction of the Iranian consulate

adjacent to the Iranian embassy in Damascus, Syria? I think it's important to keep in mind that Ramadan is still on, and Iran has exploited, if you will, the opportunity during Ramadan, the holy month when the Quran was delivered to the Prophet, to think very carefully about that question. And I think we're going to see the answer very soon. Ramadan will probably end on Wednesday. It's whenever the crescent moon in the new cycle is visible. That probably will happen on Wednesday. Now, Iran wants to have a strategic impact. Iran wants to signal its strength, its power, its influence, its reach. So whatever it does has to meet that test. On the other hand,

Iran has made it very clear that they do not want this war to widen to include the United States as Israel's ally. They know that that means a war with us, and that will be extremely destructive and problematic for them, but that will create also a new set of circumstances involving other states. They recently sent a message to us, and I say recently within the last 24 hours, reminding us that they had not closed the Straits of Hormuz because they had chosen not to do so this is a clear and unambiguous message and if you push this matter too far we will unhinge the global economy and remember the numbers of states beyond ourselves who are dependent upon the oil and gas that flow through the Straits of Hormuz, roughly 30% of world oil

and gas are considerable. And they are not anxious at all for the global economy to fall apart, for supply chains to shut down and enormous problems to ensue. I mean, we talk about inflation now. We can only imagine what that impact will be. And we're already seeing the Suez Canal effectively put out of action. So I you know the Iranians are not going to launch everything they own in Israel that's not going to happen and there's going to be something less than that but more than a symbolic strike which is what we've seen from them in the past this will have to be meaningful that's the best I can do for you there are are a lot of options, you know, there are no shortage of targets. And once again, the Iranians have said, if you stay out of this

thing, United States, we will not attack you in the region. And we're very vulnerable there, as we've discussed in the past. If Iran and Israel get into a serious military conflagration and the United States comes to Israel's defense and Iran appears threatened, is Putin going to sit by and do nothing? No, absolutely not. He's already put Russian naval forces in the region. His submarines are in the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, as are many of his surface combatants. Some of them are shadowing us. They're certainly within range of our own assets. So no, I think it's very clear that Mr. Putin will act as an ally of Iran. And it's very important to understand this. The Russians have recently placed more troops, not major formations, but more Russian troops on the border with Israel

on the Golan Heights. And this is not an inconsequential move either. And I think that what the Russians are anticipating is that before anything else happens, Israelis will eventually attack Hezbollah. And I think that's the true trigger because if the Iranians do as I say launch strikes that are meaningful strategically but not uh massive in in character in other words not designed to inflict mass casualties and destroy everything in Israel right then I think uh Rafa will fall uh I don't know how many people will be murdered as a result of those attacks, but I'm sure substantial. And then the Israelis will turn on Hezbollah. And that's an entirely new game. And I wouldn't be surprised if the Israelis actually used some tactical nuclear weapons against

Hezbollah. Because the Israelis understand that any battle with Hezbollah is a battle of annihilation. Either Hezbollah annihilates them, or they annihilate Hezbollah is a battle of annihilation. Either Hezbollah annihilates them or they annihilate Hezbollah. To preclude the second part, annihilating Israel, I think they'll use tactical nuclear weapons, and they can do that. Is the pressure from the street in Arab countries continuing on Arab elites and heads of state to resist Israel militarily? Oh, yes. The pressure is absolutely enormous everywhere. Obviously, it's more acute in a place like Egypt. Egypt is very fragile to begin with, you've got almost 100 million Egyptians living on an infrastructure designed for what, 30 or 40 million. Egypt is extremely fragile. I'd be very surprised

if the events that we're describing right now occur, that General Sisi will survive. Unless, of course, he does the thing that he doesn't want to do, which is that he directly involves the Egyptian military in a fight with the Israelis. You could also see something similar to that happen to King Abdullah in Jordan, which I think would be a real tragedy. Abdullah has been a force for stability and common sense and wisdom in the region for years, but he may not have much of a choice under the circumstances what's different of course is the weapons at the disposal of the iranians and certainly of hezbollah are are quantum quantitatively greater and more lethal than anything seen in the region before which leads

us back to an israeli response the israelis will be inclined to use tactical nuclear weapons, and especially against a concentration of force and power like Hezbollah. What is a tactical nuclear weapon? We're not talking about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Less than five kilotons. In other words, something that you would only know it was a tactical nuclear weapon based on the detection of U-238 in the soil, some of the gases emitted in the atmosphere, the shape of the cloud, the height of the cloud, which would be much higher than anything you would see with conventional weapons. We would know it. Now, what would we do about it or say about it, given the control exerted here in Washington? I'm sure we wouldn't say anything or do anything. And I'm sure we would deny that it was used at all. But that's Pandora's box. Once that's open,

all bets are off. Were you surprised at the reporting two or three days ago by an Israeli journalist of the extraordinary reliance on AI by the ADF, even naming the software and calling it Lavender and revealing that this Lavender program put up photos of suspected Hamas sympathizers, gave them numbers from one to 100 and then targeted them no matter who they were with or where they were, in a mosque, in a hospital, at home with their family, with their children and grandchildren, killing everybody around. Did any of that surprise you? No, not everybody around. Did any of that surprise you? No, not at all. Remember, from the Israeli vantage point, if you are standing near or around someone they consider to be the enemy, such as Hamas, you are effectively a co-belligerent. You're also a combatant. You deserve to die. That's very important. Remember that the majority of Israelis, as has been pointed out by several people,

I think Gideon, the journalist who's worked in the past for the Jerusalem Post, has said this, but he's not the only one. The majority of Israelis really think the Arabs that live in Gaza should be exterminated. Are we now in an arms race for AI? Oh, I think so. But, you know, we have to understand what AI isn't. And you've already seen evidence for that. AI is not the equivalent of human intelligence and decision making. It can dramatically accelerate things. It can allow you to do much, much more with less. But it's not the equivalent of a human decision maker. So AI, if you do what the Israelis have done, will obviously go to whatever extreme based on the parameters that you applied to it. It's better software, it's better algorithms, but it's not human. It's not a human decision maker. Here's a clip from our friend and colleague, Professor Jeffrey Sachs,

who I think agrees with you, recounting an interesting presentation he attended recently in Europe with European generals, not American generals, and their love of AI. If I may, before we turn to the last topic, just let me give you one little snippet more about AI and the military. And that was just a typical event. I was at a security conference in Bratislava, Slovakia, recently. And this question of AI and militarization came up. And it was a discussion on stage of some NATO generals. And their point was not, this is a dangerous and runaway technology, or how can we get

it under control, or what kind of diplomacy. The entire talk was, we'll beat the Chinese in this. We'll beat the Chinese in this. We can stay ahead. This is how generals think. Maybe it's right for generals to think that way, but it's not right for governments and diplomats and the public to think this way. And the generals must not be in charge. But their view was, well, we're just in another arms race. So we're going to maximize, accelerate in every way the deployment of these extraordinarily dangerous tools. What do you think, Colonel?

Oh, I think he's telling you the truth. What I would add is the following, that first of all, there is an unhealthy obsession with technology in the senior ranks of the U.S. military always has been the notion that somehow or another, any technology, if properly applied, will rescue us from certain disaster in a war. The second part is that generals tend to understand only the things that they can count. We learned that in 1991 when we listened to Schwarzkopf, who would come on every night and tell us how many tanks or other armored fighting vehicles we had destroyed with precision over the previous 24 hours. Now, most of that turned out to be nonsense, but it was the sort of thing that he eagerly believed. And there was this underlying assumption that if you could destroy enough equipment, that everyone would give up and go home. Well, that never happened. It didn't happen until we attacked on the ground.

I think this is a permanent malady. And Jeffrey Sachs is right. You have to have someone with common sense. Here's another example. Shortly after Dr. Brzezinski became the National Security Advisor under President Carter, he took a trip out to Offutt Air Force Base. That's where we have today's strike command. At the time, it was, you know, still Strategic Air Command. And they would give you a canned briefing hours and 62 minutes and 14 seconds,

the United States Air Force could deliver every nuclear warhead in the inventory with missiles and aircraft to all of these targets that were shown on the screen in what was then the Soviet Union. And if you looked at the screen, there were so many red dots all over the screen that the Soviet Union had almost vanished from the map. Dr. Brzezinski looked at this and said, good Lord, why are you annihilating all the people in Ukraine, in Lithuania, in Latvia, in Estonia, in Kazakhstan, in Uzbekistan? These people aren't your enemy. Your enemies, if you're concerned about them,

are located primarily in the Russian areas, and they're confined to very specific targets for command and control and decision-making centers and so forth. It was insane. And, you know, the Air Force had no answer for it because their job was, here, I'm giving you 500 warheads. I want them delivered as quickly as possible on targets. That's their job. There was no thinking involved. We tend to treat target sets as a substitute for strategy. They're not.

They never have been. You have to have a strategy with an attainable political military objective that will give you an advantage and allow you, hopefully, to end the conflict principally on terms that favor you, but also terms that your opponent can live with. We have this legacy of annihilation that we have inherited from the Second World War. And it's a disaster. It's the wrong mentality. That mentality has not been on display in Ukraine. Putin has made it very clear that's the last thing that he wants. Now, if he had wanted to annihilate everything in Ukraine and everybody in Ukraine, that could have happened.

You know, what you're seeing with the Israelis is that they've decided, frankly, that the population in Gaza should either be driven out, starved, or killed. So they are organizing to do that. That's their goal. Now, you can like it or you can oppose it. I don't think it's a good idea. I don't think Israel will survive this, frankly speaking, because I don't think it's legitimate in any way, shape, or form. I also think there are alternatives to mass murder.

But, again, that's the view. But you haven't seen any of that with the Russians, and not at all. And you're not going to unless we are very stupid. And that, unfortunately, is a caveat because given the clown show in Washington, stupidity is on stilts already. Colonel, thank you very much. Stupidity on stilts. Let me ask you one last question. How close is all this to a major war? Israel, Iran, Ukraine, NATO? Well, I think the Iranians and the Israelis will answer that question. We'll find out when the Iranians launch their counter-strike. If they do, as I think they will, that will not be justification for all-out war by Israel or anybody else. However, the next decision

that has to be made is by the Israelis. How do they respond? And if they respond with overwhelming force against Iranian targets, then I think you get your regional war. And what people don't understand is that the Turks aren't going to sit it out. They'll be obliged to intervene. The Russians obviously will stand by the Iranians and ultimately back Erdogan as well if he if he becomes involved in this Erdogan is not going to let Egypt sink he has interests in Egypt

I suspect the same will be true in Jordan I think you're going to see this this entire Muslim world coalesce into a loose confederation of states that all agree that Israel has to be opposed I hope it doesn't reach the point where they all decide that Israel has to be annihilated that's my greatest fear the state that is currently trying to annihilate what it says its enemies are in Gaza risks that same thing happening to them that's that's always the danger in war Colonel McGregor thank you very much my dear friend thanks for your time thanks for your analysis thank you for this great piece uh which will soon be up uh where can people find this piece it's up on the website at the American conservative will Israel's war expand and will Netanyahu bring the U.S. along for the

ride? I commend it to everyone interested in the colonel's analysis. And remember, Judge, at the end of the piece, I point out that all of this is happening overseas involving us, our money, our arms, our forces, at a point in time when our borders remain open and the situation inside the United States grows more fragile by the day as a result with the rise in criminality and the disintegration of American society. And again, to go back to your earlier point, where is Speaker Johnson on that topic? Right, right. And we have, I don't want to extend the session any longer, but we have hundreds of Marines on a little island off the coast of Taiwan. What is that, a tripwire waiting for something to happen?

An unnecessarily provocative action in an area where we have no interest whatsoever other than cooperation and peace and stability. And commercial enterprise. Exactly. Thank you, Colonel. I hope to see you again soon. All the best, my dear friend. Okay. Thank you, Judge.

Sure. Coming up later today, let me make sure I have my times right, at 2 o'clock this afternoon Eastern, Matt Ho. At 3 o'clock this afternoon Eastern, Karen Kwiatkowski. And at 4.30 this afternoon, Scott Ritter. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom. Thank you.